Alan Jones: Coronavirus lockdown will do more damage than COVID-19 itself
If we are to seize the opportunity to recover from this crisis — and the economic chaos caused by panicking politicians — we must remove roadblocks once and for all, writes Alan Jones.
Opinion
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If dealing with the coronavirus “crisis” has tested the resolve of the Morrison government, it is as nothing compared to the economic challenges that lie ahead.
Mind you, the government’s task has not been made easy by the alarmism that took root early on.
It’s only a little more than a month ago that Australian newspapers carried the headline, “Experts warn 150,000 coronavirus deaths in Australia”.
Not long before that, the deputy chief medical officer, Professor Paul Kelly, from the ANU Medical School, a public health physician and an epidemiologist, forecast that, in the worst case scenario, 150,000 Australians would be killed.
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This frightened the tripe out of everybody, including the government.
And, what followed was the Australian economy being put into a coma.
Now the ugly truth is we have to pay the price.
The Morrison government must be given full credit.
None could have done better, with one exception.
We are, on many things, but climate change and coronavirus in particular, too dependent on “modelling”.
In Britain, Professor Neil Ferguson is the professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College, London.
He has been instrumental in forming the UK government’s response to the coronavirus and other crises.
In 2005, he said up to 200 million people could be killed from bird flu — 282 people died.
On swine flu, in 2009, his advice to the government was that the disease would lead to 65,000 UK deaths. It killed 457 people.
It’s this alarmism that leads government into economic black holes.
So far, as at the time of writing, Australia has conducted 510,000 coronavirus tests.
The total active cases are 1089, which is 0.21%.
The total number of deaths in NSW as a percentage of those who have been tested, 0.018%
In Queensland the six deaths, as a percentage of the number of tests is 0.006%
As Carl Heneghan, the director of the Centre of Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford has said: “The damaging effect now of lockdown is going to outweigh the damaging effect of coronavirus”.
The choice before us
As our debt climbs towards one trillion dollars, there are only three ways we can pay it off – increase taxes, cut expenditure or promote economic growth, make a bigger national economic cake.
In relation to taxes, the most simple metaphor of the problem is penalty rates.
Surely now if we are to pay our way, that era is over.
No hour of the day should be treated any differently if we want to create jobs.
And if someone came from outer-space and saw the terrible problems now with unemployment, and they learnt that every employer who provided an unemployed worker with a job would be taxed, they would think we were in serious need of medication.
Payroll tax and penalty rates are job destroyers.
But the problem is worse than this.
One of my listeners nailed it.
“The left are revelling in this new form of socialism adopted in Australia. Whether temporary or permanent, the present situation comprising four of the five elements beloved of them (big government, big spending, big welfare and as little work as possible) has them salivating.
“The only missing ingredient of their Utopia is big taxes … That’s probably why we hear so little of late about climate change, big business, Tony Abbott, coal, women’s rights, the environment, green this and that, mining, Catholic priests …
“The reason is possibly that the left are gobsmacked that they are getting much of what they want without having to shout at anyone … just wait until this virus mess is over and we try to resume normal transmission …
“They will not sit idly by while the benign form of socialism is replaced in turn by what they didn’t like before.”
Which brings us back to economic growth.
Let’s start with the simple point of cutting expenditure.
Does the country need 2.0467 million public servants, one for every 11 people in Australia?
Can we afford the wage bill, $166.8 billion?
Do we get value for our money with departmental heads in Canberra on salaries of between $865,000 and $914,000?
And not one of them has dropped a cent through all of this.
If we are serious about economic growth, we have to get out of the road of the doers and the givers and shove all the takers to the sideline.
What did Tony Abbott once say: “We need lifters not leaners.”
One of the greatest lifters in this country is Gina Rinehart.
Single-handedly she has created the largest single iron ore mine in Australia and one of the largest in the world.
No prime agricultural land there at Roy Hill, in the middle of the Chichester Range in the Pilbara in Western Australia.
50,000 people worked on the project, but here is the rub.
Gina Rinehart had to get over 4000 regulatory approvals — permits, licenses, you name it, over 4000.
How can we seriously talk about productivity?
Yet the opportunities are out there, waiting for us.
We just lack the vision, I hate the word, and the will to grab these opportunities by the throat.
Central to our future must be water
Every impediment is placed in the way of harvesting water.
The Fitzroy River, in the Kimberleys, in Western Australia, wastes 7000 gigalitres of water every year in the average wet season.
It flows into the Indian Ocean.
That’s 14 times the amount of water in Sydney Harbour, flowing past productive Australia and into the ocean.
Can you get a licence to access this water?
Don’t be stupid! At last count, the West Australian government allowed one water licence.
How much water?
Six gigalitres!
That leaves 99.9991 per cent of the water racing into the Indian Ocean.
How many cattle could we raise with that?
How many crops could we grow?
As Gina Rinehart has pointed out, according to American and Canadian research, cattle could put on between 15 per cent and 28 per cent more weight, over a year, by drinking clean water.
Just imagine if this water were harvested.
It’s not just the farmer who would benefit.
Cut the red tape
What about the other supporting industries –— those who supply the tanks, the troughs, the hydraulic crushers, the truckies, the fencers, even accountants.
Red tape and bureaucracy are everywhere, scaring off investment and an impediment to economic growth.
In Sydney you can’t build the Ritz Carlton hotel.
That has to be the laugh of the year.
Government is elected, but it clearly can’t govern.
Barry O’Farrell became premier in 2011.
Then, as now, we had a massive housing shortage.
I remember telling the premier that I could name for him reputable developers who were “shovel-ready”.
“Give the names to Brad Hazzard”, he said, “the planning minister.”
I did. The projects are still “shovel-ready”, nine years on.
Yet, Sydney has a housing requirement of more than 300,000 homes over the next 20 years.
A reputable developer is wanting to build 20,000 homes, provide 30,000 jobs and $10 billion of private sector investment.
But, no one can navigate their way through the cesspool of bureaucracy which seems to have the government by the throat.
With this approach, by bureaucracy-driven government, we will never be able to pay the bill that alarmism has imposed on all of us.
It was Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, the 19th century French critic and journalist who argued, in translation, that “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.
The acid test is upon us.
If the response to the changes wrought by the coronavirus, sponsor the same impediments to economic growth as existed before the crisis, then we may as well start waving the white flag.
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